What do I do to honour my baby?
I am starting to feel a little cynical about this project. I thought maybe I would stop writing these posts, except that I am happy to be writing more frequently, connecting in a way to my girl. But my heart rebels against so many of these prompts and I realize how angry I still am; twenty-one months later and still filled with rage at what happened to my daughter and – especially – with the idea that I will make something of her death.
What do I do to honour my baby? I raised a few thousand dollars for the Children’s Hospital in her name. Just by posting on F**book. All the people who cared about me but who were too scared to talk to me gave money in her name. I joined the board of a not-for-profit society started by dear friends of mine. I walked to raise awareness.
I did these things, and I felt proud about doing them. I felt proud to be Anja’s mother, to do something in her name. And yet, if you ask me to talk about how I honour my daughter, my first reaction is to get my back up, to snarl and hiss and say, honour? Honour? It feels like just one more variation on the world’s attempt to help me find meaning in her death, to force me to find some way to say it was okay what happened to her, that I am okay with it, that her death did not mean nothing at all. And I will go to my grave protesting that there is no greater meaning to a child’s death.
But then there is the way that I write here. I write post after post, add word upon word, and – as I said in the first post I made here – every word is for her. So, maybe this is how I honour her. Not in grand gestures. And not in desperate promises to find beauty or live authentically or manifest grace. But just in these simple words. This effort to reach out and connect, to find others who will love her and remember her with me. In this anonymous space, this place I have made, just for me and her, I write my love over and over and over. My love and my anger and my fear and my bewilderment and then, again, my love: word after word after word, all for her, to whom I can give nothing else.
I too am a lot angrier than I admit on a daily basis. And questions like honor? And meaning? Give honor and meaning? I call bullshit on that. For me. I’m not able to do anything publicly, or express anything that somehow makes this all seem a little more ok.
Reading along. Nodding along. Hurting along, beside you.
Sometimes I wonder about the anger. I am, undoubtedly, very angry. But I’m not as angry anymore that she died. I mean, I hate it, and it breaks my heart, and I don’t think it will ever stop hurting – but I’m not holding on to as much anger about her actual death anymore. My anger really flares when it comes to feeling like the culture we live in expects us to find beauty or meaning in this kind of death. I might find beauty, I might find meaning, but I don’t want to be made to feel like that is an end goal, that that is what ‘good grief’ is. In the earliest days, the idea of finding meaning, or making meaning out of her death, enraged me and I thought that feeling would fade a little as I ‘integrated’ her death into my life…but it hasn’t. Still raging over here. And maybe it is what you say about doing anything publicly – you honour your dead child publicly and people know what to do with that, and are full of ‘helpful’ platitudes about the good we do in their names, etc. and it feels like one more way of letting the outside world off the hook, easing their discomfort with our tragedies, when ours is ever-present and probably always will be.
Yes – easing their discomfort with our tragedies. That’s what I get angry about. Almost like it makes me angry that it feels better for the outside world in seeing these act BC they think it feels better for me. When they don’t know how hard it all hit in the first place…and still does.
The idea that “healing” means somehow feeling like her death had meaning or purpose makes me very angry also. I can do lots of things in Eliza’s name–make donations, raise awareness, write pages and pages–and none of that makes it okay that she died. I can accept that there are gifts in my life I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t died, and that doesn’t mean that her death was meaningful. It’s my biggest existential crisis. Her death has no meaning except the meaning that I give it. And in that case maybe the only way I can honor her is by somehow not falling the fuck apart even as I stagger under the weight of what it means to be alive when she is dead. But that doesn’t feel like “honor.” you know?
Um, huge nod!